It's dead simple to manage files in git or such. What Chezmoi adds over that are niceties like:

* Permission management, so that ssh wouldn't refuse to log you in because ~/.ssh/authorized_keys is 0755 instead of 0644.

* Templating, because ~/.ssh/config has slightly different options on Mac and Linux, so you can't use the exact same file contents as-is on both systems.

I can run `chezmoi apply` and get all the files in the right places and they're all setup just right. Like so many others, I'd previously built my own ad-hoc system to handle these things, and it ended up looking like a crappy, half-baked version of Chezmoi. When it came up on my radar I immediately ported my own system over to it and never looked back.

Even just as a user of nix there has been this problem of how to manage dotfiles - people have git repositories for them but they are copies, because the actual dotfile in use is never tracked

For a System administrator the problem is many orders of magnitude worse

Last time I looked, it only worked with NixOS.

I don't understand what makes it more understandable than Home Manager, though.

If you look at the source of a Home Manager `programs.foo` module, it should look mostly like this:

  home.packages = [ cfg.package ];
  xdg.configFile."foo/config.yaml".source = yamlFormat.generate "config.yaml" cfg.settings;

It took me a single afternoon to learn the basics and start using it. Contrary to what I initially thought, I didn't have to migrate all of my dotfiles at once. Then over the next couple of days, Codex migrated everything else for me.

One major benefit for me is that I no longer need to have once-in-a-while tools installed, because I can always spin up a temporary shell with `nix-shell -p packageName`. This significantly decreased the amount of software I have in my environment.

This works great with agentic coding. Agent wants to run `ripgrep`, but you don't have it? Tell it to run `nix run nixpkgs#ripgrep` instead.

But the biggest benefit is that now that you know Nix! So you can start using it to create reproducible development environments and uninstall mise, asdf, nvm, pyenv, etc. You can spin up reproducible servers running NixOS and never touch Ansible again. You can even install it in your router.

Or you can do none of that and continue just using it for your dotfiles. It plays nice with other tools.

It's not complexity its questionable documentation. Picking up Nix is really hard yet the best we got is a mishmash of unofficial recourses and many of them are out of date and/or focus on the packaging side which is terrible for introduction.

Guix solves the same problem in similar ways, though it uses Scheme as its configuration language.

how nix-pilled do you have to be to think that nix is the "only real solution" to dotfile managers?

A agree, Nix is very doable. With Deepseek or other cheaper models, you could get a whole headache-free setup done in one weekend for a few cents on the dollar.

Nix's complexity isn't with itself, its if you try to step one bit off the beaten path where it immediately starts to grate.

Nix doesn't work on windows.

It's also a massive pain the ass to work with

What a snakepit of a comment! I know there are tensions within nix but this feels like a classic case of Chestertons fence at a big scale.

Your second example i dont understand what you're getting at.

This is just a mechanism for the builder to inject credentials during fetch time. The derivation is still content addressed (it's a fixed output derivation).

The derivation isn't even marked as impure or whatever. There is just an environment variable that gets injected by the builder into the build env so you can authenticate.

This is required to talk to hugging face

What are you on about?

Or do you mean that the cas address of HF should directly be addreessable in nix itself?

Worse is better.

Mommy, the Nix Reformationist is scaring me